


In, or: The Hyperbolic World Explains the Terror of the Female Experience

by Quitebrilliantindeed



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Coming of Age, Femininity, Genderfuck, Magical Realism, Mentions of Solid and Solidus, Multi, Sexual Violence, Violence, oh boy (not in a sexy way)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-18
Updated: 2017-01-18
Packaged: 2018-09-18 00:18:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9353510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quitebrilliantindeed/pseuds/Quitebrilliantindeed
Summary: "He tells himself it’s nothing. It’s normal. That’s what people do to people like him. Rose is special, Rose is different."





	

**Author's Note:**

> PLEASE USE YOUR BEST JUDGEMENT IN DECIDING IF/HOW TO READ THIS.
> 
> Minor spoilers for the fic to follow, but if you feel like you may be sensitive to some of the listed content, please read, consider, and make your decision appropriately.
> 
> This work contains multiple (albeit short) instances of fairly-explicit rape, as well as non-explicit implications of childhood sexual abuse, and a very graphic fisting scene.  
> Gender and genitalia are discussed and explored alongside ideas of masculinity and femininity, gender roles, implications of gender dysphoria, and (sometimes graphic) symbolism relating to such.  
> Violence, portrayals of mental illness/disability, and language are canon-typical.
> 
> I cannot stress this enough. If you are sensitive to any of the tags or warnings listed, please exercise caution. 
> 
> This wasn't written as porn, but I'm never gonna tell anyone what they can and can't jack it to. I hope I can make you think even while you're jacking it though.

“Jack,”

Rose says his name as if it’s real.

“Jack, it’s okay,”

Rose tells him that a lot.

Someday, he’ll realize there’s a reason for it—that his norm is no norm, that there was a time before he recoiled under her touch, long ago, when his body was small and safe, not yet prepared to contain such magnitudes. A time far beyond his recollections—a blank spot, hidden behind a tunnel of crushed memories, the kind he keeps locked and caged, free only when the bars snap, and they spill into present day.

For now, his body will recoil in a manner beyond his control, and he’ll pray that Rose won’t notice. Her beautiful hands, large and encompassing, work their way down his face, down his neck, across his shoulders, hardly aware of how he shrinks against the touch. He loves her. She loves him. There’s nothing to fear.

Their first time together was idyllic—or almost. Jack knows he was too red, too shy, but Rose was on top with an almost supernatural perceptiveness that he didn’t understand then, doesn’t understand now, and won’t understand for at least another year.

Months pass. The world doesn’t glow so much when Rose finally huffs, in her strong, sweet voice, for _him_ to fuck _her._ A panic shudders down his spine, but he tries, because it’s Rose, and he loves her, and she loves him.

He can’t do it. He doesn’t know what to do. He’s scared. He’s shaking. He stumbles out of bed, Rose shouting behind him. He can’t make out her words—if she calls at him with sympathy and concern, or plain derision.

Jack spends the night awake and alone, pulling vodka from the freezer. Ironic, how her insistence brings comfort and her restraint brings terror. He’s an object. Not an actor. He thinks—or rather, feels—that there’s an origin point to this problem, that it exists out of reason, not chance.

He’s right, but it’ll be another year until he understands it in the waking hours.

He was six and his father loved him very much. Funny how his memories start there, how anything earlier is just a gentle face, a sweet taste, a mother and a dress. Things were different then—he’s certain of that much.

He learned too much from that new father. Not so much about love, but plenty about war. He was alive, fed, dumb and docile. He didn’t understand his father any more than the world he lived in, but he accepted it. He couldn’t remember what it was like to have anything else. To own anything else, inside of him, or out. He thinks he shouldn’t hold all the knowledge his father gives, but when he catches the other boys’ eyes, they say “don’t ask.” He doesn’t even know if they’d understand it any better.

He’ll understand in a few years. Ten at most.

(Ten years pass and he should understand. He doesn’t. The memory sinks to the bottom of the jar.)

“You’re like a fucking zombie,” Says the girl perched atop his hips, her face unreadable, invisible. Jack feels his jaw begin to quiver, so he turns face and hides it in a pillow. They finish like this, Jack’s fists clenched in the sheets, mouth silent, eyes out of sight. He hears her mumbling as she leaves, something about the difference between “easy” and “inanimate” but Jack doesn’t really understand what she means.

A week later, a boy takes him home. He kicks Jack out when he starts crying “like some kind of freak.” Jack still doesn’t understand. He’s just doing what he’s been shown—doing what comes naturally. They stop altogether when Jack shrieks and about drives his fist into the guy’s mouth.

“Between your face and your—whatever—I—” He stops and clasps Jack’s shoulder a little too hard. Jack stiffens and searches for some kind of weapon or escape—though he can’t imagine why.

The fist hits a little harder next time. He feels as if he might kill the other boy. The thought is the only thing that drives him to stop hitting.

 “What’s _wrong_ with you!?” The boy shrieks, wiping blood from his nose. “We’re all faggots here, you fucking—You think you’re getting raped or what!? The fuck!” Jack sits, unflinching, shirtless, trembling, blood washing up and down his hands, splattered onto his cheeks. He doesn’t know what he _means_.

The incident passes a little too quickly, too quietly. Jack peruses a dictionary and stares at words he thought he knew—its contents plant an idea of truth in his head. He starts to think that he didn’t grow up like the other kids.

When he moves to New York, half a million “incidents” weirder, and no longer a plain teenager or plain soldier, Rose tells him that he’s good in bed. It surprises him, but he doesn’t really have the language to tell her.

“Hah,” Is all he can manage. It’s a sarcastic, dry noise, the kind you only give when you don’t believe a word they say.  Rose’s brow knits, but he can’t tell if it’s confusion or frustration that draws her face together.

“I mean it,” She insists. “You’re…cute.”

Jack isn’t the best with words, not like this at least, but he’s adapted well enough to know she genuinely means it. She’s never stared when he’s gotten angry, she’s never chastised the way he freezes. Yet still, her pretense of normality masks something almost erudite underneath. Whatever is below, he doesn’t think it’s judgement—but he thinks there might be suspicion. Suspicion of why he’s like _this_. (It’s more than suspicion; she knows everything, and he’ll learn soon enough.)

At least he understands some of himself now, although he wishes he doesn’t. He’s never talked about it, never wanted to—but probably needs to.

Maybe.

Sometimes, before New York, before FOXHOUND, there was something other than toluene on his tongue—something tasteless, but tangible in his muscles and bones. The memories hit—he’s going limp, falling over the edge of a stool, falling into arms that don’t really want to catch him. That’s a drug, isn’t it? There was a drug. There’s voices as they slip in and out of him—

“I told you! I told you!” And they laugh, together, at him. Hands cup his face, his hips, and that’s it. He fades away again.

He wakes up alone and naked on a couch, disoriented, wishing (quietly, below the surface of thought) that he weren’t so stupid. He thinks he should be better than this, that it’s his own idiocy—at least until it happens again and again and again, with drugs and without, wherever he goes, whenever he tries to speak. Another day, another cigarette, another CVS at 3 AM buying god knows what.

It’s still his fault, it’s still his fault.

Face pressed to the floor, five, six men. Trying to scream until a hand jams against his tongue and presses to the back of his throat. His vision blurs, and two shards of glass seem to move inside his gut.

There, in that first horrible second, he wishes that he were more like them. Maybe it would hurt less.

He shuts down. Jaw goes limp, eyes stare into the middle distance—he isn’t there for the ugly minutes they spend raping him.

In places like this, Jack isn’t left alone when they’ve finished. He’s viewed with disdain and sneers, shaking, made to redress before two pairs of eyes, his head kept down, still spitting blood from his mouth.

Blood falls between his legs that night. A snake whispers in his ear, telling him he’s come of age. He stops the blood with cotton sheets, and pretends it didn’t happen.

Jack becomes very good at pretending.

When he leaves for FOXHOUND, a sense of relief defines each step out of those barracks. He starts growing his hair. It’s the first time he’s ever made a decision for the sake of fashion alone—and his old bob is long gone by the time he meets Rose. She tells him how much she loves the length, how she loves the way it brushes his shoulders, even if no one else does. That’s more than enough for him.

It’s better still when she takes fistfuls into her hands, using it like a leash while she grinds against him. Sometimes, with her thighs against his ass, she pulls harder, enough to fix his gaze on the ceiling, fixing his chin high in the air.

Still—she always pulls back before she goes too hard, and Jack is left with an emptiness he loathes and fears. He wishes she’d just hurt him. She won’t go further than hands around his throat. There’s something sinister to the way he craves this, something that dwells in pain and punishment. He wants to die. He wants her to kill him. Justice, he thinks. Payment for his sins. (What sins—?)

He nearly passes out one night, spit dribbling down his chin, tears from his eyes. Rose no longer looks so horribly cold as she finishes—her hands are clamped over her mouth, as if she’s, at last, gone too far and only now realized it. Jack tries to open his mouth, tell her she hasn’t even gone far enough, but his thighs are wet and his head is cloudy and his soul is set on locking down and shutting out. It reminds him of those five, six, men. Those five, six—how many—times. He starts to flail and scream, until Rose’s arms wrap around his shoulders and ease him back to bed.

He’s been a military man for so long now, yet he can’t shake the feeling that war is even more than just _evil_. More than just…  whatever they say it is.

Big Shell comes to tell him he’s right.

The man he—no, they’re all— _supposed_ to trust, grabs him. He doesn’t think—he gasps and shoves back and tries not to flip. He tells himself it’s nothing. It’s normal. That’s what people do to people like him. Rose is special, Rose is different. Rose knows him—knows more than she should.

Rose has always known.

Her words twist:

_“I’m not special. I can fuck you like I do because I know you. I know every detail. Every time. It’s like watching a movie, wondering how you can be so stupid, so easy to fuck.”_

Jack bites his hand until the thoughts stop flowing.

Rose tells him she’s pregnant.

It’s not the way her voice wavers, or how the signal fails at the crucial last second. It’s not just every horrific, garbled call he just endured. None of it makes him doubt her honesty, makes him doubt reality, the way a single word can. Rose can’t be pregnant because she can’t be pregnant. It’s not possible. Why isn’t it possible?

As he slips back into his skull suit, he glances down his body, staring long and hard at the space between his thighs, waiting for it to flicker and tell him the truth. No matter how he squints, he can’t make out a shape. The uncertainty gleaned does nothing to steady his shaking hands, but instead pushes his thoughts towards the uncovering of some terrible truth. A cat and a snake, their fingers jammed inside of him, somewhere away in this vast metal stomach. For a moment, he is mesmerized by the assault and starts to mimics them, palm cupping his groin, fingers slipping between folds. A spark shoots through him as he grazes some peak. It guides him down further, prodding him to stick one, two, three fingers inside.  He falls to his knees and pushes in, screaming with each thrust, like his hand has gone beyond his own awareness. The sensation is unbearable— it’s not enough, he needs more. His screeches melt with his moans as he forces his entire hand inside, past the wrist, to some place where children and dead cum lie.

Snake hasn’t noticed. Snake hasn’t said a word. It almost unnerves him—to have a man watch, but not move to touch him, to bury inside of him, uninvited.

He pulls out violently and rocks back on his heels, then to the floor, legs spread, hips twitching, suit stretched between his calves. His ragged gasps draw his hands across the floor in slick circles, curl tight around his waist. That’s it. It’s over.

No child of snake or cat lives inside him, not even his own hand. What he thought was there—it isn’t. At least not—not right now. He dresses without incident while Snake stares at the ceiling, still eerily polite against the backdrop of violence Jack has come to expect.

Altogether, the moment is another grotesque stain on a grotesque tapestry—but it teaches him something.

Less than a year and Rose really is gone.

The child—it may have never existed. Sometimes, he still doubts that it ever could have. Cocks and cunts, he hates all those words. He hates having one, hates having both. He just wants Rose again, kissing his neck, taking him all for herself.

He thinks of her even now, prostrate in the cold, his clothes slowly stripped from his frame. A man cups his chin and smiles. Jack can only gaze back, eyes hazy, thoughts racing. All the quivering stops and they take him, body, mind, and spirit. He doesn’t stop screaming until the moment he faints, and they start to cut away.

It’s like every assault was practice—practice for today.

Now his body is synthetic. Nothing has changed.

**Author's Note:**

> I'll leave you all with something a friend of a best friend said: "Coming of age for men is like crossing a line. Coming of age for women is like entering an arena."


End file.
